


Sketchbooks & Wine

by boredhswf



Category: The Office (US)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:33:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25116196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boredhswf/pseuds/boredhswf
Summary: A series of episode related one shots. I wanted to get inside Pam's head a bit, hence the title. The little snippets she would sketch out, this is more of a written version of that. It's mostly canon, although I can't promise it will stay that way.
Relationships: Pam Beesly/Jim Halpert
Comments: 4
Kudos: 26





	1. Casino Night

She wasn’t sixteen anymore.  
  
That was the inane, repeating thought running through her mind as she gripped the desk behind her; the grain of the wood biting into the flesh of her hands. Her mind spun, a dizzying blur of colors surrounded her was she struggled to gain purchase on her world. Five words. Five words had sent everything she thought she knew and burned it to ashes around her and she now stood in the remains. She loosened the grip of her hands, bringing them forward to look at them; angry pink lines against pale white skin as the circulation once again flowed. She still felt his hands, now long gone, as if they had branded a path on her skin. The feeling of his body as he had pulled her to him washed over her again and she felt unsteady; the axis of her universe had now shifted and realigned itself to his. The taste of him was soul-stirring and frighteningly familiar. Like a home, she was experiencing for the first time. Exciting and comforting in equal measure. She closed her eyes hoping to make the spinning stop, but her mind pushed forward against her wishes and she swore she could still detect the ghost of him in front of her.  
  
There was a finality to the door of the taxi shutting behind her. A conclusion in the way the key turned into the lock of the door. The dim flickering light of the TV drawing shapes on the wall beside her, a recapitulation on the last ten years of her life. She hated this house, she realized with certain clarity; the couch she didn’t choose, the recliner that was given to them, the TV that was far too expensive and obtrusive for the small room. The veil of complacency that she had worn for a decade had fallen from her eyes and she now saw everything anew.  
  
She stood in the doorway, keys in hand, purse still on her shoulder as she listened absently to the crowd on the TV cheer at the football player’s breakaway run.  
  
“You’re home early. Did you lose all your money that fast? I knew you were going to.” He didn’t bother to look around as he spoke and she studied the back of his head, the light of the TV creating a glowing rim around it. There was a peace to her next steps. She saw it all laid out in front of her, the series of events that brought her to this defining moment.  
  
She wasn’t sixteen anymore and this wasn’t the life she was meant to have.  
  
“We need to talk.”  
  
  
_______________  
  
The rain fell in large drops around her, washing away the remains of her indecision. She felt it begin to soak through her clothes and the chill that it sent reminded her she was alive. She heard the church bells begin to chime the hour down the street and she knew she had to speak. He had said his mind, and taken a chance; laid part of himself bare in front of her. Hers to do with as she wished and she had left it there. For the first time in her life, his face was indiscernible. She drifted her eyes over him, taking in how he was now redefined to her. His gray t-shirt revealing to her the planes and surfaces of his body that she now allowed herself to notice. His unshaven face and the vulnerable lines of his neck below the hair that she had run her fingers through, the skin there that she longed to know the taste of.  
  
“I left him.” She stated needlessly as if her presence on his doorstep could be explained any other way.  
  
“You said you were going to still marry him.” His words sounded broken, laced in bitterness.  
  
She shook her head and looked down at her soaked shoes, the brown leather ruined.  
  
“I was afraid. I still am, but I’m here.”  
  
When he didn’t respond, she looked past him, brown boxes stacked high in the hallway, and for the first time noticing the packing tape clutched in his hand. Her eyes flew to his with dawning realization.  
  
“I took a promotion in Stamford,” an answer to the unspoken question in her eyes. She felt a chasm open up beneath her, threatening to swallow her entirely into its abyss. This was her punishment; her penance. She had been a coward for years. Seeing but not acknowledging the look in his eyes and the way they held hers a second too long. The way he seemed to have a magnetic pull to her, being in her presence continuously and making himself scarce when her fiancé would appear. The sad anguish his eyes would unknowingly reveal as he waged an internal battle only he could see, hiding it instead with a flippant comment. The deafening silence between them when some errant phrase had crossed the line into the dangerous territory of certitude.  
  
She knew.  
  
She had denied the truth in front of her for fear of shaking the carefully constructed vision of the future she had built atop a sand foundation; had long taken advantage of the solace that he would always be there to assuage her insecurities. That was no longer the case, and it was her fault.  
  
“Were you going to tell me?”  
  
“I wanted to but…” he faltered, the implication that if she had asked, he would stay; endure the pain of her being promised to another man if that’s what she had asked of him.  
  
The question of what she truly desired for him stared her in the face and it came down to this. Every molecule in her screamed for him to remain; to stay in this dead-end job in this dead-end town, for her, with her. Her soul wanted him to have everything, and her soul won out over the unrelenting pull of him.

“You were made for so much more than this,” she said resignedly, the words tasting bitter on her tongue, “This job and this place.”  
  
“And you?”  
  
His challenge was unclear and instead of probing for clarity, she fell back into the familiar space of self-deprecation. The most definitive point she had used to argue away the obvious in her mind all these years: she wasn't nearly good enough for him. 

She pulled at her lip with her teeth and shook her head with a relinquished tilt. “Even me.”


	2. Initiation, Diwali, Merger

Dishes. Laundry. Cleaning bathrooms. This was the monotonous drudgery of being an adult and for her, it was surprisingly freeing. For the first time in her life, she was living for herself, not beholden to her parents’ unreasonable expectations or caring for a man-child that fled from responsibility at every available opportunity. It was just her now and _her_ dishes and laundry and dirty bathroom. When she stared at the tiny room, off the tiny kitchen she felt empowered, emboldened. For years when she had visualized her future it was vague and uninspired; awash in charcoal smudges under gunmetal grey skies. Now she felt the color creeping onto the canvas, cautiously around the edges.  
  
There was a remnant that continued to hold her hostage. A phantom limb that ached and throbbed in the absence of the skin, muscle, and sinew that used to occupy the space. A void left open and vulnerable and no matter how she attempted to fill it, only momentary relief would be the result before it opened again, pulling her down with it.  
  
 _Him._  
  
She felt him, sometimes at the most mundane of times and it would catch her off guard, threatening to knock her off the precarious platform of independence she had created for herself. The mention of his name. His coffee cup in the cabinet. A man in line in front of her who wore the same aftershave.  
  
She would swallow down the misery; the vibrations and echos of him that seemed to be written on her. The connection with him that, even in a crowded room, felt as if they shared some secret they weren’t telling the rest of the world.  
  
“Uh, hey.”  
  
An utterance that washed away any progress she had made with its two syllables, and she hadn’t realized until that moment how another person’s voice could simultaneously cause her heart to race and her stomach to drop.  
  
His intake of breath, the way he exhaled a chuckle, the smile she heard in the inflection of his voice; she could visualize him on the other end with painful accuracy. She sank down in her chair, resigning herself to the backward progress and allowing his voice to fill her the way it always had. She knew the way he held the receiver and the way his long hair would flip out slightly at the ends behind his ears. She knew by the tone of his voice whether he was leaning back or sitting forward and the way his tie would be looser by this time of the day, revealing the top of the white shirt beneath it. She glanced up at his former chair and for a brief moment they weren’t separated by states and telephone wire and he was five feet from her desk. Again.  
  
  
_____________  
  
  
She sat in the quiet, hollow, reverberation of her car, pressing the button to illuminate her phone again for the thousandth time as if having it lit up would somehow make the message come faster. The same way sitting in her car, instead of walking to her apartment would also ensure some sort of reply.  
  
It was a moment of weakness, she knew that and she scolded herself at the frailty of her countenance that made her think that because of their chance, hour-long fall back into the comfortable cadence, that he would want to hear from her. Or even care, for that matter, that their boss had failed so spectacularly and publicly.  
  
She stared at the pixels on the screen that formed his name, immediately regretting the impulsiveness that drove her to text him. A flaw in her that somehow relinquished control of her rational mind and thought he was the only person she wanted to share it with and acted on that thought. Billions of people on the planet and there was only one she cared to hear the reaction of.  
  
The blank screen looked back at her mockingly. If this was a message, she heard it loud and clear.  
  
  
_________________  
  
  
  
It was like one of those days she had read about that happened in someone’s life. A literary device. A trope in a movie. Not something that happened to real people and certainly not to her ordinary existence, only punctuated by trips to the grocery store and sales at the mall. The best and worst day happening simultaneously. The moment his arms wrapped around her for the first time in months encasing her fully as he always had; the timbre of his voice, the warmth of him she felt through his clothes as he held her tighter and longer than necessary, the way his eyes lingered on her when he spoke of how good the place looked. All at once counteracted by the moment the slender, elegant hand caressed his back with a familiarity that caused her heart to fall into her stomach and dreaded panic to wash over her in realization. Both of them happened hours apart and both had her staring into scarlet liquid in her glass, spinning the delicate stem in her fingers.  
  
Of course, he had found someone. Free from the tethers of Scranton, he had moved on; away from her and onto another. Another that was confident, well dressed, and whose beauty was just this side of exotic. Everything she wasn’t. Her opposite in a grey pantsuit. She took a long sip, savoring the notes of oak and floral briefly before forcing it down her throat to combat the ever-present nausea that had plagued her since the parking lot. She had barely made it to the restroom before the tears fell and as she stared at her own reflection in the mirror, her red-rimmed eyes, her mother’s knitted sweater, the smooth curls she had so carefully spent far too long on, and she felt like a fool.  
  
"I’m so stupid.” She whispered harshly to herself as she looked into her own eyes. She gripped the edge of the faded pink Formica countertop until her fingers started to ache as she tried to gather herself enough to make it through getting air in her tires and getting home. She heard her voice through the paper-thin walls, distinctive to her now from the others as one would descry a threat, and she felt a wave of nausea build up inside.  
  
She had not moved from her place on her second-hand couch since she had arrived, grabbing the bottle and one of only two wine glasses she owned. She had gone through several of the stages of grief, some more than once, often circling back to anger. When he had walked up to her again, ambushing her cold resolve, she allowed herself to hope, for a flicker of a moment, which had proved to be a grievous mistake. She replayed his words to her before she finally made it to the sanctity of her car, the blood rushing in her ears so loud she felt like screaming. ‘Seeing someone’ repeating like a mantra in honor of her failures; what was so easily in her grasp, now replaced with an aching sadness. She had held on to ‘maybes’ and ‘what ifs’ like fragile glass, only to find it shattering in her grip.  
  
He was gone. Lost, distant, unattainable.  
  
Gone.  
  
She reached for the bottle, tipping it and watching as the berry flavored numbness filled her glass again. For the first time in her life, she felt truly alone. There was always a flip side to every coin and this was hers. She was free but lonely. The resigned feeling fell heavy over her and she saw the darkness of it vignette the edges of her mind bleakly. Her one-room apartment felt suddenly large and the sounds of her neighborhood suddenly quiet.  
  
As the wine flowed freely in her veins now, she pressed on the bruise of her pain masochistically, imagining what they were likely doing at that very moment. Allowing the anger and envy and torment to wash over her once again. When her mind supplied her with a visual image of what loving Jim Halpert might look like, tears fell fresh down her cheeks, raining on her hand gripping the glass.  
  
The clock on her DVD player flashed 2:01, an electric blue reminder that she had work in a mere seven hours.  
  
He would be there. With her. And this was her purgatory.


	3. The Convict

There was an awakening of sorts, a discovery that she was much stronger than she realized. The voices of doubt, fear, and self-loathing, which had been so deafening for weeks, were quieter these days. If they managed to gain volume in her mind, she didn't believe the lies they told, and they fell into the background noise again. 

She had thrown herself into her art, the cathartic release of her emotions through the expression of the right side of her brain. She used every brushstroke as a salve, every smudge of charcoal with her finger a bandage for her battered heart, letting the pain pour out of her and onto the paper. Her sketchbook sat opened on her desk, a small display of her growth and change, a private catalog of her stream of consciousness, sketches of things she saw, snippets of words that came to her. She had wanted it to be healing, a way to express herself without actually talking to someone, but as she thumbed through it, her vision was rather myopic, the topic singular. Regardless, it gave her hands something to do, allowing them to instead push him out of her thoughts even though he sat closer to her than ever before. The mere feet felt like miles, and every day it seemed he drifted further, even as the copier's proximity gave her a front-row seat to the torture of hearing him banter with Karen in a way he used to only do with her. She would catch herself studying the back of his neck, where the edges of his long brown hair and the top of his collar collided as if all the mysteries of the last few months were written there. 

There would be moments. Exchanges she would cling to, despite her efforts to brush them off, and replay them at night as a rebellious tear would draw a path down the side of her face to her hair as she stared at the blackness of her ceiling. Whispered flashes danced in the shadows of her mind: catching his ill-timed glance in the conference room, a brief, murmured goodnight as he grabbed his coat, the flicker of his eyes as he checked his messages. He had only been back a little over a week, and there were a thousand little cracks in the façade she rebuilt every day on her drive to work. Some cracks were like fissures, the slow drip of his physical nearness wearing away at her. Other times were like a hammer to the stone of her, remolding her entirely until she didn't know where the inside was any longer, unrecognizable from the shape she showed the world. She watched across the bullpen as Karen held the new coworker's baby, and he leaned casually against her desk, the familiar lines of him always calling to her. Their conversation was brief, but when Karen met her eyes confidently as he walked away, there was an implicit declaration in the language of women, a meaningful statement on the symbolism of a baby...and him. 

She had no idea what Karen knew about her. There were times she would glance at her with suspicion, and she swore he had told her everything; every dark, terrible secret she had ever confessed to him with her eyes and the undercurrents of all the things they left unsaid. Other times, she would smile warmly, and Pam was certain he had never even uttered her name in her presence. Surely she would not see her as benign if she knew that just a few short months ago, the man she was sleeping with, who held her hand and opened doors for her, had laid everything at _her_ feet, and she had let him walk away. 

More often, days were punctuated by the lack of him, as he actively avoided her. His ambivalence to her was surpassed only by the pitying contempt most of the eyes in the office held for her since she had called off her wedding; believing she had foolishly thrown away her only potential chance at happiness.

Square footage does not lie, and despite his efforts, eventually, their paths crossed. She held her breath when he had miscalculated on mapping his path and perfectly timed breaks and went for coffee at the same time as she had. Out of her peripheral vision, she watched him pause slightly in the doorway as the blinds rattled on the glass, then resigning his fate, felt him brush behind her, the softness of her cardigan moving somewhat from the cotton of his dress shirt. Knowing the meter and rhythms of his movements so intimately, she could tell he was awkward and stilted, gone was the easy, familiar flow of him around her. He stood inches from her, shoulder-to-shoulder facing the coffee maker, and her body leaned towards his by degrees of its own before she counteracted the gravity and righted herself. For a brief moment, the noise of the office faded, and she could hear his soft inhale and exhale. 

He glanced at her with a slight smile before reaching for the cabinet in front of her.

"Your cup is still here. No one ever tossed it." She spoke quietly, wading slowly into the stormy waters that surrounded him. The unfinished thought hung between them, and she knew he heard the words _ 'I wouldn't let them' _ as clear as if she had spoken them aloud. 

"Oh, good. I would hate to have to go mug hunting. You can't find 'Grandma is a Great Cook' just anywhere." 

The levity of his comment fell and landed on the cheap linoleum tiles at their feet. There were a dozen broken words that lingered in their eyes before she reached up and grabbed his old coffee cup, and handed it to him. The brushing of their fingers as he took it, a gesture so ordinary to go unnoticed any other time and with any other person, sent tiny electric sparks through her that settled warm in the pit of her stomach. Now, she knew what those hands felt like on her body, the pressure, and give as they traced invisible markings on her soul. _That_ night, with her repurposed bridesmaid's dress and hastily wiped away tears, had changed her fundamentally and she would never again be the same. Somewhat reassuringly, when she lifted her face to his, she read the same story in his eyes; awareness and knowledge were now the enemy. With an anguished grimace he shifted away from her as if she had burned him and the pain had just registered to his brain. She felt the moment snap like a tight cable, and they were thrown, once again, into the basic kitchen with its fluorescent lights and phones ringing in the distance. 

Then there was Andy. Her initial impression of the man was a cross between a used car salesman and a circus performer. Still, when he stood in front of her desk, reading word for word, every last detail out of the book ' _Things that annoy Pam Beesly_ ,' she sat in shocked horror at his incredible insight accented by his profoundly tone-deaf request for a date. It wasn't until he smacked Jim on the shoulder as he passed that it all became clear, and as he turned slowly to smirk triumphantly in her direction, shades of him returned to her, vibrant and elusive. Their secret language, understood only by them, was exchanged once more, and she couldn't stop the smile that spread from somewhere deep in reply. Despite her efforts to school her expression, by the time the camera crew called her in for an interview, her cheeks ached in overuse. She barely heard their questions as she replayed every nuanced thing Andy had mentioned and how that meant Jim had remembered so many minute details about her, and the oddly intimate feeling that held. 

She felt something stirred alive inside her that she had not felt in a very, very long time. 

Hope. 


	4. Benihana Christmas

She had always loved Christmas.

Halloween had always been her favorite holiday, pretending to be someone else, the momentary escapism appealed to her in almost every way. Christmas, however, was her second favorite, and this year she was going to reclaim it as her own. For years, the holiday had been dictated by the whims of his family, whatever the Andersons wanted, she was forced to submit to. It had been three years since she had been with her own sister and parents on Christmas Eve.

The formation and execution of the prank on Dwight had been the result of an exceptionally boring afternoon and the discovery of an errant post-it note stuck to the back of a red folder in her bottom drawer. ‘Hang in there, Beesly’ written in his familiar half-cursive, half-print made her stomach drop the way it did stepping off an unexpected step; the fleeting panic and rush of adrenaline had left her feeling flushed.

When he had come back to Scranton with _her,_ she had purged her bottom drawer of all the little symbols of him she had kept: notes, receipts, Valentine’s Day cards; all the tangible evidence it wasn’t all her head, that she once had a best friend who loved her. In an effort to cling to the remains of her dignity, she had trashed them all, a victory that, instead of propelling her forward, filled her with regret, and left her hollow. Tracing the letters with the tip of her finger, she unconsciously looked up at him. She watched as he leaned back in his chair, one hand on the phone, the other running his fingers mindlessly through his lengthy brown hair as he charmed the customer on the line. Just like that, he had pulled her under again, unwittingly giving her the fix she didn’t realize she was craving. The ever-revolving door of wanting him and wanting to hate him.

She flipped the red folder over and wrote ‘Classified’ in bold black letters and let herself imagine he was the one to tell her to do it, that it belonged to them.

Somewhere along the line, it had become their unwritten rule to exchange something at the Christmas party. It was their ritual, a talisman with far deeper meaning wrapped in the benign trading of an inexpensive gift. One of the many ways they skirted the lines of acceptable platonic boundaries.

All the holiday present she needed was the look on his face as he read through the folder she had handed him and for a flicker of a moment, they were there again, that sacred place she longed to be. She saw him recoil, mentally pull himself back under control, with a lame expression and even lamer excuse, as he put the space between them once again. She was a fool. The humiliation of allowing herself to be vulnerable again swelled in her stomach and she just wanted to run. He had shut the door on her, and the renunciation stung like the unshed tears in the back of her throat.

The tendency towards retaliation wasn’t a personality trait she was necessarily proud of but when she saw an opening to befriend the woman who now held the man she loved every night, and make Angela’s day a little bit worse than her own, she took it. The disconcerted look on his face at his current girlfriend and his -whatever she was to him- conspiring together for a common cause was just the icing on her revenge cake.

As much as she hated to admit it, she had fun with her. She almost forgot about the daily comparisons her mind drew unwillingly with her in almost every way. She was always so put together and well-spoken that it caused her to study the current object of his desire, wanting to somehow decode what it was she had that was missing from herself. It was hard not to be disarmed by her laid back personality, to laugh with her at the absurdity that surrounded them the way she used to do with him; the camaraderie that came with being the only two sane people in an insane office.

Roy was there, the irritating reminder of her mistakes years in the making. Charming and attentive, he was making an effort in ways he had never previously tried in all the years she had known him, and it pulled at her sense of empathy. He was pining after a woman that was long gone the same way she was longing after a man she had given up in a pathetic train of loneliness, and for that, she felt sorry for him. He was so completely obtuse to his own shortcomings and his knowledge of her so shallow that when he proudly gifted her a coffee table book she already owned, that had sat in their mutual living room for years, she just smiled and thanked him and when he went to hug her, she let him. After all, she was as much to blame for her circumstances as he was.

It felt like fresh betrayal to watch him mock her in exchanging a gift with Karen, after having refused her; the shallow paper cut of it stung deep along with all the others she had sustained, and she was beginning to think her optimism about Christmas was misplaced.She heard the mechanical whirl of the tightening focus of a camera lens and she suddenly needed to check to see if her car was locked, even though she knew it was.

All the ground she had gained with him felt lost and when he said goodnight to her, she glanced at him half expecting dismissive apathy, but instead he stopped and turned, the faint flickering of something neither one of them ever wanted to recognize in the softness of his eyes. The easy way he slipped once again into the dark corners of her soul, that she tried so damn hard to push him out of, had her instantly forgive the transgressions of earlier. His familiar banter and meaningful smile caused the backsliding resignation to overwhelm her resolve yet again.

There was no hesitation when he waited to walk her to her car after she locked up the building at the end of the night; the essence of who he was as a man, the parts of his character she cherished, had never left. The brush of his shoulder against hers in the elevator almost felt as rebellious and daring as it had all those years when she would allow herself the momentary slip into another life the eighty seconds alone with him in the small space afforded her.

He held open the glass door, and they both pressed into the winter air in separate directions to separate lives, when he pulled up and turned to her again. She briefly wondered if the gravity he held on her worked in both directions.

“Hey, uh, thanks for the gift, really.”

“Yeah, it was fun.” She braced herself for the inevitable resumption of their clearly defined roles and his desire that everything be put back into place.

“You understand, though, right? Why I have to have ... boundaries,”

The anguished expression on his face made her want to give up everything for it to go away, even if that meant her. She hated that it seemed what she wanted so desperately only seemed to cause him pain. He took several impulsive steps in her direction before visibly stopping himself, his hand gripping the strap of his messenger bag tightly.

“Because if I don’t...” he shook his head ruefully, biting back the words precariously on his tongue.

The desperation in his eyes made her feel reckless, and she asked the question she wasn’t sure she wanted the answer to but longed to hear anyway.

“What? You would what?”

She could see his breath coming heavier now, making delicate panes against the night air. She watched his shoulders set as a physical symbol of his internal war.

“I should go.” He closed his eyes, as one does when bracing for pain they know is coming. “I don’t want to go,” slipped out softly against his will, “but I need to go.”

She shook her head in agreement, watching as he turned and walked to his car in the far corner of the lot, his shape fading into the darkness and taking his light with it.

She exhaled, words and emotions held in along with the carbon dioxide, released into the chill that sank around her; seeing his taillights flicker on and hearing his engine begin churn to life, she slid into the cold cloth seats of her Prius. His brake lights in her review mirror didn’t move for several long minutes as they both sat idling in empty cars across an empty parking lot.

Closing her eyes, she allowed herself to begin the torturous slide into her imagination where he was sitting in his car debating on whether to come back to her; to change the trajectory of both their lives. She opened them again, logic reminding her he was only letting his car warm in the winter cold and she quietly slipped out the lot as quietly as she had slipped in ten hours earlier. As she replayed the entire exchange in her mind like a skipping record on her drive home, a small smile formed from somewhere deep and forbidden.

She had always loved Christmas.


	5. Back From Vaction

Experience. That was something she lacked in certain areas of her life. Even though she was in the magical years of self-delusion between twenty-five and thirty, where you were old enough to know better but could still get away living like you didn't, she also had enough self-awareness to know her knowledge of men was lacking. Sure, she knew _about_ men and everything that came along with relationships but not about _playing the game_ of dating and you can only learn so much from watching rom-coms. She had dated Roy at one point, of course, but the concept of "dating" in high school was more along the lines of her following Roy around while he hung out with his friends, dutifully playing the role of arm candy for a popular football player.

There had been only a handful of dates she had been on as an actual adult, and no one considered them successful by any stretch of the imagination. There had been Alan, which in hindsight, someone Kelly would pick for her clearly would be the exact opposite of what she would want. She had only agreed because she finally _could_ and because the taste of someone else still lingered on her lips. The entire thing had been horridly uncomfortable, from Ryan and Kelly's dysfunctional relationship playing out across the table like a bad B-movie to Alan's off-putting self-importance. She had narrowly escaped that night without even a kiss on the cheek and pretended to not see his look of disenchantment when she walked away.

There had also been Danny. It was clear, from nearly the beginning, what exactly he wanted out of the ridiculous pretense of a date. He insinuated and she feigned ignorance. She slipped into pretending to be oblivious to his overt overtures rather easily, she reflected, but then again she was well versed in ignoring the obvious.

"What are you doing later?" he had asked as he leaned casually against reception in a way almost reminiscent of someone else.

"Uh, I don't know," she had answered dumbly. Not one of her more suave moments, she can admit that now.

With smile and charm and bravado, his answered, "I do," left little to the imagination. He had thought himself out of her league and she had agreed but went along with it anyway, partly because he intrigued her, partly because she had nothing better to do.

To his credit as a salesman, he had put in quite the effort, even asking her out a second time in hopes of closing the deal but when it became clear that it was in vain, he quickly abandoned the chase. She had thought about Danny on occasion, and what it had been like to be on the receiving end of that kind of male attention, even if the man was only pretending to care about what she was saying.

When she overheard Karen telling Phyllis about the new restaurant Jim had taken her to, she thought about Danny again and about why she hadn't let herself enjoy what had been in front of her and why the reason for that was clearly out enjoying what was in front of him.

Experience also came with age and wisdom, two things that were only born from time so maybe time was all she needed. That and maybe she should have fucked Danny after all.

Like a fool with a masochistic streak, she pushed down her pain to be a good friend. Part of Jim was better than none of him, and if that was all she was given now, she would take it. If what it took for him to look her in the eye and talk to her was listening to him talk about another woman, then that was the cross she would bear. For the briefest flickering of a moment at that break room table, he was her Old Jim and she was his Old Pam and they had never damaged each other.

Like an endorphin high, she pressed her luck for the thrill of another hit, pulling up apartments for rent on his side of town and calling him over. He leaned over her like he used to, his voice deep and breathy against her neck, drawing up something resonant and feminine inside her that had been long forgotten; the warmth of his arm on the back of her chair felt like a revelation. She leaned back infinitesimally when he leaned down for a closer look, so close she could feel the heat of his face on hers, hoping he wouldn't notice; the same way she hoped he wouldn't notice the apartments she pulled up were the worst in Scranton. She was a good friend but she wasn't a saint.

Her buzz was still there when she watched him down in the warehouse, working the cameras and working Dwight and Andy like the masterful instigator he was.

"I think I owe you one," Karen suddenly appeared next to her, happier than she had been all day.

"Sorry?" She felt cold dread begin to work its way up her spine. Happy Karen meant Jim had followed through and her heart began to beat harder in anticipation of its fall into her stomach.

"Thank you for talking some sense into Halpert. Days Inn Room 228 was starting to get really depressing," Karen smiled brightly and she felt sick at actively pushing the man she loved further into the arms of the woman standing in front of her. Honesty was far too difficult when it came to the topic of _him_ and she retreated back into the familiar space of patronizing repression.

"Oh, yeah don't worry about it. I mean, he was being ridiculous," she absently wondered if the color had drained from her face because she felt the fragments she had shored against her ruins falling away piece by piece.

"Yeah, but thanks. Seriously."

What could she say but a mumbled 'sure' before retreating behind the dark shelving of the warehouse, panic washing over her.

The long hallway to the back stairs was the only place she could get to hastily without being seen and she slumped unceremoniously down on the cheap budget bench at the end of the hall. _This was what she had come to, this_ _was_ _how far she had fallen, what did she think would happen?_ Her mind pressed play on its pre-recorded message of self-loathing while the tears flowed beneath her fingers and dripped incriminatingly down on her skirt like a scarlet letter. She couldn't leave but at least no one would come looking for her for a while. For some reason that mental reminder made her bite back a sad sob.

She heard a door open at the other end and _his_ voice of all voices break through the electric hum of the florescent lights.

"Ah, no thanks Kev. I think that poster will be perfect behind your big TV," his jovial reply swept down the hallway and paralyzed her. She heard several footsteps that then stopped.

"Pam? Did I find your secret spot? You can't hide from Mich-"

His words ceased when she lifted her head at him and based on his horrified, scared expression, she looked as loathsome as she felt.

"What's wrong? Pam, what is it?" Faint amusement at his initial reaction broke through her mortifying embarrassment for a brief moment. Concern rolled off of him as he seemed to be poised to call an ambulance, or clear the building, or chase someone down. None of which had ever been offered to her before, rather, annoyed apathy often was the most common reaction any man had ever given to her tears.

"Nothing. I'm fine." She stood and turned away, frantically wiping her face and the streaks of mascara she knew were there and she sensed that he had moved closer. She could see exactly what he looked like behind her eyelids even though she couldn't actually see him and she began to think that this particular skill set was more of a curse than a blessing; she could never quite tell him the truth when he was standing the way he was, looking like he wanted to pull her into hi **s** embrace but that invisible tethers were keeping him from it, and that he resented them.

"I don't buy it, Beesly, tell me what's going on?"

She faced him slowly, dreading the look of pathetic pity that he most certainly had at the ridiculousness of her situation. Instead, she saw something more complex, more like a melodic song with notes of concern and pain and regret each playing their part across his melancholy visage.

She opened her mouth to speak but the words died there so she sighed instead, shakily exhaling months of emotions. A wordless conversation passed between them with well-practiced acuity and she knew he had read her like the pages of his favorite novel before sliding the bookmark into the crease and shutting it for another day.

In a moment of foolishness or perhaps weakness, he reached up and wiped a smudge of mascara off her cheek with his thumb. She tried not to close her eyes at his touch but quickly lost the battle and committed the delicate skim of his finger across her skin to her soul and captured the look he was giving her permanently behind her eyelids. She opened them again, realizing he was breaking about ten 'good boyfriend' rules by being there and doing that and she wanted to give him an out. She didn't want to be responsible for a good man making a bad decision. And just like her Old Jim, he didn't take it, defiantly stroking it twice more before finally letting his hand drop.

She slumped back down on the bench, now emotionally exhausted, and she heard him sliding down the wall across from her and taking a spot on the cold floor.

They sat there for a long time, him on the wall with his knees bent, and her on the bench, along with the electric buzz of the lights and the occasional loud voice from the warehouse. Karen never came looking for him as she had predicted she might, making her humiliation complete, but instead, they had been miraculously left alone, the universe taking pity on two fractured souls seeking solace. She didn't want to think about what he told her or didn't tell her, because either scenario filled her with foolish hope, and she had been plenty the fool already.

He never left and she didn't ask him to. And suddenly her grin and her life stopped being so forced.


End file.
